War and the Liberal Hegemony

Why did the United States intervene in the Second World War? The question is rarely asked because the answers seem so obvious: Hitler, Pearl Harbor, and what more needs to be said? To most Americans, World War II was the quintessential “war of necessity.” As the late Charles Krauthammer once put it, “wars of choice,” among which he included Vietnam and the first Gulf War, are “fought for reasons of principle, ideology, geopolitics or sometimes pure humanitarianism,” whereas a “war of necessity” is a “life-or-death struggle in which the safety and security of the homeland are at stake.” If World War II is remembered as the “good war,” the idea that it was “necessary” is a big part of the reason why. The enemies were uniquely wicked and aggressive; Americans were attacked first; they had no choice but to fight. This perception of World War II has had a paradoxical effect on the broader American foreign policy debate. On the one hand, writers of an anti-interventionist bent rightly perceive that the war’s reputation as “necessary” and therefore “good” has encouraged Americans to believe that other wars can be “necessary” and therefore “good,” too. (Krauthammer believed the “war on terror” was also one of “necessity,” and Richard Haass put the Gulf War in the “necessary” category, and in 1965 even David Halberstam and The New York Times editorial page believed that American intervention in Vietnam was necessary.) On the other hand, anti-interventionists are not alone in believing that, even if World War II was necessary, the circumstances were unique and therefore irrelevant to subsequent foreign policy discussions. There will never be another Hitler, and the idea that a foreign great power (as opposed to a terrorist group) might launch a direct attack on the United States seems far-fetched even today. World War II thus stands apart, bracketed from further relevance, as perhaps the only widely agreed “necessary” foreign war and therefore the only “good” foreign war that the United States has ever fought. But what if even America’s intervention in World War II was not “necessary,” as most Americans would define the term? What if it, too, was a “choice” that Americans made, based on calculations not so different from those that produced the later wars of choice in Iraq, the Balkans, and Vietnam? Those many Americans who opposed American involvement in Europe and Asia in the late 1930s and early 1940s certainly did not believe the war was necessary. This was not because they were ignorant of the potential risks posed by Hitler and the Japanese Empire. The America First Committee, a group that combined corporate elites such as the chairman of Sears Roebuck with scions of the eastern establishment such as Joseph Kennedy and Chester Bowles, launched itself in September 1940, three months after the unexpected conquest of France by the German blitzkrieg. Its founders understood the implications of France’s defeat. They not only believed but predicted that Britain would be the next to fall, leaving the United States without a single meaningful ally in the European theater. (The bestselling author Anne Morrow Lindbergh wondered whether it was “courage” or “stupidity” that made the British fight on.) With Japan on the march on the Asian continent — Japanese forces, having conquered much of China, invaded Indochina three weeks after the Committee’s founding — Americans in the fall of 1940 faced the real possibility of a world in which Europe and East Asia, along with the Eastern Atlantic, the Mediterranean, and the Western Pacific, could soon be dominated by a trio of militaristic dictatorships (Mussolini’s Italy being the third.) This was the moment — arguably the nadir of the future Allies’ fortunes — when the America First movement took its stand against further American aid to the victims and prospective victims of Nazi and Japanese aggression. Just a few weeks earlier, after the British evacuation at Dunkirk, Winston Churchill gave his famous “we shall fight on the beaches” speech, with its concluding prayer, mingled with reproach, that, “in God’s good time, the New World, with all its power and might,” would come “to the rescue and the liberation of the old.” That was precisely what the American First movement

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